CADD (Calamity Attention Deficit Disorder)

 Click here to compare the oil spill's size to your area. You'll need the Google Earth Plug In for this cheery exercise It's GIGANTIC!

The theorem itself is simple (luckily):  

As a society grows more complex, its problems grow bigger and more difficult to solve. 

The corollary is: 

The experts who now try to head off problems are less capable than ever of being effective.

To cite one aspect of our precariousness, the same kind of utter destruction and chaos stemming from the Hundred Years' War took less than a decade during World War II. The next big war catastrophe will take what? Less than an hour?

Everything grows more compressed as history "progresses."

There have been oil spills as long as there have been oil wells. But now, quantities being extracted are in the mega-million barrel range; the most advanced techniques are more inexact; and the goo is transported by pipeline, ship, truck and rail across ten thousand disparate routes.

(One can easily overlay the oil spill analogy onto the Wall Street mess. Or the medical care mess. Or the immigration mess. Each industry only needs some specificity in tweaking.)

The first reaction is that our government is failing us, both on the theoretical, regulatory side and even more so on the physical enforcement side. But it is failing us on another level all together - the organizational side.

The system of regulation and prevention needs deconstruction first, then some rebuilding. This brings to mind the legend that Henry Ford was inspired to build his mass assembly plants by watching cattle carcasses being butchered by boners, each of whom had a specialty that they cut as the sides of beef kept moving along a production line. Deconstruct a problem, then reconstruct the new edifice.

There are roughly a half dozen oil producing regions in the United States, and another dozen or so ports that handle the bulk of oil imports. Then there are pipelines, refineries and storage facilities.

Instead of each of these regions and types of facilities falling under the single banner of the EPA and/or Interior and/or Commerce, each should have a commissioner and a commission with inspection and prosecutorial powers, as well as emergency injunction powers. These commissioners (and their teams) would act independently and be associated only with Federal Courts NOT inside their geographical jurisdiction.(Theoretically, the Gulf of Mexico's issues would be heard in Boston.)

Moreover, such injunctions could have a predetermined length of time - say 30 or 60 days - in which operations dangerous to the environment or workers (listening, coal mine operators?) are closed down or severely curtailed.

The commissioners and the members of his/her commission could not have voting members who have ever worked in the industry they oversee. (It is the height of madness to have former oil executives and engineers oversee environmental and worker safety in the oil drilling industry, for instance.)

In fact, it is crucial that ordinary, well-educated people from outside affected industries are appointed as watchdogs and not insiders. Could we do any worse with fresh thinkers?

Possibly there should be a set of incentives for such commissions in the form of bonuses. There should no doubt be a set of disincentives for these out-of-control industries that have ruined our natural and financial environment, our health care delivery system, and sent our immigration approach into free fall. 

Somehow, we need to find a way to focus our expensive watchdog agencies on their real long-term missions. The old way simply is not working. We need new ideas and new systems of doing business, particularly when it comes to the environment and catastrophes that could effect the rest of human history. Meaning forever. 

Don't Go Near The Water - Pollution and Natural Rights

Watch: Don't Go Near The Water by the Beach Boys (1971)

Think quickly: to whom do public waterways, lakes, wetlands, and ponds truly belong?

Nominally they belong to the famously elusive “We the people.” Federal, state, county and municipal governments own millions of square miles of waterways; that is to say, we own them collectively. Private individuals "own" hundreds of thousands more waterways. Corporations "own" yet others. But, only the people can truly own such a resource.

Some waters are useful for drinking, some for recreation, others for aesthetic reasons. But all fit into an overall ecosystem that provides each of us with a safe, “big picture” environment.

Healthful drinking, bathing, cooking, and swimming; safe fishing and hunting; visual delight, and overall good health are collective, natural rights of all human beings.

Currently, arguments that wended their way through the Supreme Court over 5 or more years ago quibble about the phrase “navigable waters,” and have left gaping holes in the EPA’s jurisdiction over polluters of various states.

For nigh unto 40 years, “navigable waters” was correctly interpreted by regulators and courts so as to include many large wetlands and streams that connected to major rivers, and thence to the oceans. Essentially all waters were covered throughout the country. Polluters, essentially misguided, greedy misers, challenged that idea.

The two Supreme Court decisions suggested that waterways entirely within one state, creeks that sometimes go dry, and lakes “unconnected” to larger water systems may not be “navigable waters” and are therefore not covered by the act — even though pollution from such waterways can make its way into sources of drinking water well beyond artificial state borders. Everything is connected and the Earth is small.

If pollutants make their way into drinking water, you can bet your last dollar they are making their way into fish, animals, and crops, and thence into your and your children’s fatty tissue, creating the perfect medium for cancers and other illnesses.

By what right do polluters act in such irresponsible ways? Simple. They hold to property rights as described by antique thinkers from Locke and Madison to Hegel, and finally to today’s radical libertarians. The writings of these mindless property advocates has to be discarded now and forever, and the stronger notion of the common wealth has to replace their destructive philosophies.

Polluters may be industries that dump everything from radioactive materials to heavy metals like zinc, copper, chromium, cadmium, etc., into our collective waters. The polluters may be cities and towns that do not properly treat sewage and storm runoff from roads. Untreated insecticides, paint, solvents, spilled motor oil and gasoline, bacteria and pathogens wash into our ground water, into streams and rivers and eventually into drinking water supplies.

Farms, even “organic” farms, contribute mightily to the problem. Food factories – pig and chicken farming, in particular – discharge antibiotics and hormones. Manure fouls groundwater supplies and now washes 60 percent more nitrogen into waterways than it did in the '70s, creating 230 dead zones like those in the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.

But, because of the absurd theories offered by polluters, namely that ground water or waters contained within one state are not covered by the clean water efforts of the federal government, the EPA finds itself not able to mount costly counter arguments to establish prosecutorial jurisdiction against polluters in the individual states. 

The Supreme Court right wingers, stuck in backwards notions of 18^th and 19^th century property rights, acting fittingly like chickens with their heads cut off, ignore the intent of the clean water legislation of the last four decades and commit instead to polluters. 

Just who has the right to water? 

“We are, in essence, shutting down our Clean Water programs in some states,” said Douglas F. Mundrick, an E.P.A. lawyer in Atlanta. “This is a huge step backward. When companies figure out the cops can’t operate, they start remembering how much cheaper it is to just dump stuff in a nearby creek.”